As everything in our lives becomes more closely tied-in with mobile technology, we’ll see many of our daily activities start integrating with our mobile phones. Mobile payments, for example, are just starting to gain steam and will undoubtedly be the future of retail. Why carry around multiple credit cards and a wallet if you can just use your mobile phone to pay for your groceries? As you’ll recall, the GSMA recently rallied for industry big-wigs to support a standardized system of contact-less mobile payments based on Sony and NXP’s chips.
Sony and NXP, two of the industry leaders in contact-less mobile payment technologies, have joined forces to start development on a new mobile payment standard. The new mobile payment joint-venture, dubbed Moversa, aims to promote the use of electronic wallets by developing a new chip that includes both companies’ contact-less chip formats – Sony’s Felicia and NXP’s Mifare.
Moversa will leverage the Felicia and Mifare technologies’ widespread use in secure contact-less solutions already embedded in access cards and mobile phones. The goal is to promote even more widespread use of contact-less payment systems around the world – and we welcome the initiative with open arms. We can’t wait for the day when our wallet will be obsolete and replaced by the contact-less NFC technology in our mobile phones.
We should see samples of Moversa’s efforts start shipping in mid-2008.
[Via: Yahoo]